Ex oriente lux

Transylvanian light waves reach Western Europe

Imaginations frozen at the speed of light of an artist who was tired of colour.


Artists are, per se, expulsions; they deal with the world in which they live in a way that the majority of their fellow human beings do not. This is what makes them different, they are different or something special. Artists try to fathom the essence of our world in their own subjective form, to illuminate the multiple facets of our being from different angles, they choose a medium that suits them, their means of design that best corresponds to their special feeling, which for them represents their ideal form of expression.

Lyricists choose words, try to understand the world in terms of verse, writers write novels, essayists prefer to reflect in nested sentences to do justice to as many inter-dependencies as possible. Visual artists are distinguished as draughtsmen, etchers, graphic artists, painters and sculptors are classified as stone, metal or wood sculptors.

But what do we do with Waldemar Mattis-Teutsch, who painted, drew, whose ancestors have already printed and who has now devoted himself to sculpture with intangible materials. As a sculptor, he works with the lightest, but also most volatile of all materials, the photons, which are not tangible; as an ex-painter, he turned to light sculpture.

Waldemar Mattis-Teutsch chose light, coherent light that oscillates in unison, with which he knows how to play, which he is able to domesticate, and which is characterised by an immaterial three-dimensionality as a special feature. In short, Waldemar M-T has dedicated himself to a paradox; a “normal” coloured artist has become a “paradoxical” light artist.

He has chosen holography as his medium with which he wants to pursue his exchange with the world. Light is not a simple material as it is known to be volatile, the speed of light is the measure of all things, it doesn’t go any faster, not even in the most fantastic of science fiction, – has Waldemar become a time traveller with the choice of his material? How far must one move away from the world when exposing oneself with the world until one no longer sees any light? How far does a mega-strong laser beam reach into space, how many light years does it take to be definitely ahead, to be in the void and ultimately to be able to approach the world again from the impartiality of space? No question there are simpler materials than light.

Holos = whole, total; graphein = record, document, English to record.

Waldemar is not only fast with the choice of his medium, but also thoroughly he records everything, nothing gets lost holistically. Thanks to holography, he can transform his light dreams into light spaces, he can create stable light sculptures from the ephemerality of fantasy-loaded imagination, which one cannot grasp but can look at all around. In Waldemar’s holograms, the dynamics of light and the statics of a sculpture meet abruptly, each of his holograms is therefore also a paradox.

– Matthias Lauk (1947 – 2009)